Shan looked back at the flag. Lokesh was again doing exactly what Shan was doing, except in a totally different way. The old Tibetan had gone to the flags to understand Jamyang. Shan had been in a rush with Jamyang, had not paid attention to the lama’s flags, assuming they were traditional mani mantra flags. Now as he lifted one he saw something unexpected, an intricately rendered, unfamiliar deity.
“There are thirty-five flags,” Lokesh said, as if the number were significant. “I saw him working on these. I thought it was for the shrine.”
Shan examined another flag, and another. Each of their images was different, each a painstakingly rendered image of a deity of a different color or shape. Each would have taken hours to complete.
“This would have been the first one,” Lokesh explained, pointing to the white-bodied, highly ornamented deity at the end of the twine. “Vajrasattva. This is how it begins,” he added, pointing to the words inscribed below the image.
“Namo gurubhay, namo Buddhaya,” Shan read, then looked up in query.
“Some call it the refuge prayer, others the prayer of remorse. It is the beginning of the ritual, invoking the first of the Confession Buddhas. There are thirty-five in all. Each must be invoked to purify corruption. Scores of thousands of mantras must be offered to empower each. I remember in the last month how tired Jamyang always seemed.”
Shan nodded. “He was going without sleep to complete this.”
Lokesh gazed upon the anchor deity again, as if in silent prayer, then sighed. “We should go up. We should fasten the flags as Jamyang intended.”
Shan rose and put a hand out to help Lokesh up the slope. They tied the strand tightly around the biggest stone they could find and placed it on top of a cairn. He gazed on the flapping flags, ashamed that he had not paid attention when he had been there with Jamyang, ashamed too that he not seen the lama’s need for confession earlier. He reached and touched one of the flags. “I have seen this one, or a bigger one like it. Jamyang kept it by his altar.”
Lokesh stretched the flag and examined it. “There are gods for confession of theft, of lying, of sacrilege,” he said, pain now entering his voice. “But this one”-he looked up at Shan with a lost expression-“this one is for killing.”
After a long moment the old Tibetan settled onto folded legs in the center of the square defined by the cairns, as if to continue the dialogue Jamyang had started with Yangon, the sacred mountain. Shan knew better than to persuade him to come with him. He turned and headed back to Jamyang’s shrine.
He was not sure why the shrine drew him, not sure when he arrived why he felt the need to clean the offerings again. Halfway through the task he realized he had stopped and was staring at the carved deities. “I’m sorry,” he said. The words came out like a sob. More than ever he felt he had let Jamyang down, had failed the Tibetans. The murders were going to be used to destroy the valley, to sap the essence that made it so important to Tibetans. He looked down the slope. Part of him still seemed to be searching for Jamyang’s ghost. He was more confused than ever about who Jamyang was, but knew now that he had felt great anguish in his final days. If Shan had only seen it, perhaps he could have spoken with the lama, helped him find a path other than the day of death.
He finished cleaning the offerings, checked to confirm that Yuan’s ancestral tablets were still in the little cave, then found a patch of grass above Jamyang’s shrine, where he could gaze on the sacred mountain and let the wind scour his pain. As he closed his eyes memory swept over him.
* * *
The visiting chamber was deliberately kept unheated in the winter, to encourage visitors to spend less time with their imprisoned family members. Shan and Ko had shared the room with an aged woman and her skeletal-looking husband, who spent more time coughing than talking, until she had given up and just murmured mantras beside him.
Shan remembered details, every detail of every minute in that room, etched in his memory. They came back unexpectedly, unbidden, often unwelcome.
“We were digging a roadbed when one of the men found a nest of beetles,” Ko said. His voice was always very low, conditioned by years in cells. “He tied them in his sock and sold them that night, for men to mix in their porridge the next morning.” In his own time Shan had seen many prisoners mix insects into their gruel, for the added protein. “I bought one, a big fat black one, for a purple stone I had found. But that night a lama started talking. He said the souls who had the hardest times as humans sometimes came back as beetles. He took out one of the bugs and began reciting a mantra to it. The thing just looked at him at first, never moved, then damned if it didn’t put its front legs up, together, like it was praying. In the morning all the Tibetans went over to the wire and released their beetles. They looked at me and I made like I was going to eat my beetle. They cried out and starting offering me new stones for my big boy. Red stones, yellow stones, blue stones. That lama didn’t offer anything. He just came over and touched a finger to my forehead.”
“What did you do?” Shan asked.
“I let the little bastard go. All those stones would have just weighed down my pockets.”
They stared at each other in silence. Then Ko grinned and Shan grinned back, one prisoner to another.
* * *
“I was hoping I might find you here.”
Shan stirred from his dream to find Professor Yuan sitting beside him.
“I used to go up on the roof of our apartment building in Harbin when I wanted to contemplate the world in privacy.” He gestured to the broad landscape of rich rolling hills, with the majestic Yangon towering behind them. “On the whole I think I prefer this to smokestacks and highways.”
“Your tablets are safe for now, Professor, but I can’t be responsible for them. Others could come.”
Professor Yuan ignored Shan’s words. He reached inside his shirt and pulled out a rolled-up towel. It was tattered and needed washing but he treated it like a treasure, straightening it on his lap with great care. “He was one of a noble few, our Yuan Yi. A censor, a very senior censor in the court of the Kangxi emperor. You no doubt know about the censors.”
“Scores of thousands of officials ran the empire and a few hundred censors watched over the officials to keep them honest.” The current government had perverted the term, but once censors had been the elite of government officials.
“Exactly.” Yuan lifted the towel in his hands, working his fingers into its seams. “Service in government was a sacred trust to such a man. He used the truth against many corrupt officials and made many enemies in doing so. He was in his twentieth year of service when he was sent to investigate corruption in one of the northeastern provinces, in the emperor’s own Manchuria. He discovered the entire province was run as a criminal enterprise, that the governor himself was the ringleader, siphoning off a third of what was supposed to be sent to the emperor. When he returned and made his report to the emperor’s counselors in Beijing he was arrested and tried for corruption himself, sentenced to be beheaded. An old eunuch who was favored in the court came to his cell the night before his execution and told him the emperor knew of the governor’s corruption but could not act against the governor because the governor was the emperor’s strongest supporter in the region. The emperor asked Yuan Yi to withdraw his report. Yuan Yi instead demanded to be executed the next morning to prove he stood by the truth.
“The next morning he was taken to a private temple the emperor used for ceremonies honoring his greatest mandarins, his most trusted advisers. An executioner was there with his sword. Yuan Yi was shoved forward to the block but only to see that his commission as censor was on the block. The executioner cleaved it with his blade.”